I have spent a fair amount of blog space complaining about cloud hosting. However, I use and depend upon it daily. This blog, and others that I own or help manage all run on the cloud, the MediaTemple grid to be specific. Well, the cloud wars are still raging, in case you had forgotten. Rackspace today launched their API for cloud servers, to allow applications to manage your actual servers from within your application. In their words:
“The new Cloud Servers API allows easy, programmatic access to create, configure, and control Cloud Servers from within your applications. Integrate Cloud Server functionality into your code with a familiar, REST-based format supporting both XML and JSON data types.”
If you can parse past the technical chatter, what you have is a much more powerful architecture for applications running on the cloud. Of course, when the cloud rains, your application still drops like a rock to downtime purgatory, but while up it will quite more useful. If you use the cloud, this is big news for you. Even better, if you area current Rackspace users, you can always just whine to Scoble when everything breaksm.
